Federico Cargnelutti

According to a study made by the European Commission, the number of existing open source applications already available would have cost firms around £8 billion to produce. The PHP community believes strongly in openness as a key factor for success, and has been contributing to open source for more than a decade now. But, why?

“Ask not what open source software can do for you, but what you can do for open source software” – Anonymous

Open source developers don’t write FLOSS applications because they have to, they write them because they want to. Motivation is not always driven by money, most of the time PHP developers do it for the joy of it.

So, what’s the motivation behind developing open source Web applications?

• Fun
• Challenge
• Learning
• Community and social interaction
• Credibility and notoriety
• Diversity of project structures
• Co-existence of companies and communities
• Co-existence of creative and commercial elements
• Sense of purpose
• Personal needs
• Potential career advancement
• Financial reward

Open-source vs Close-source

A great deal of open source software has been produced and distributed for free in the last couple of years by volunteer PHP programmers, for example:

• Laconica (Twitter)
• Elgg (Facebook)
• WordPress (Blogger)
• Pligg (Digg)
• PHPmotion (Daily Motion)
• Piwik (Google Analytics)
• Tiny Tiny RSS (Google Reader)
• AfterLogic (Google Mail)
• GForge (Google Code)
• osTube (YouTube)
• MyOwnSpace (MySpace)
• Magento (Amazon)
• Gallery (Flickr)
• AtMail (Hotmail)
• eyeOS (Windows)

And thousands more. Well done PHP!